Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions...

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...

A consensus has recently emerged that a number of variables in addition to the level, slope, and curvature of the term structure can help predict interest rates and excess bond returns. We demonstrate that the statistical tests that have been used to support this conclusion are subject to very...

Asset prices are a valuable source of information about financial market participants.expectations about key macroeconomic variables. However, the presence of time-varying risk premia requires an adjustment of market prices to obtain the market’s rational assessment of future price and policy...

Some observers have conjectured that the steep decline in the price of oil between June and December 2014 resulted from positive oil supply shocks in the second half of 2014. Others have suggested that a major shock to oil price expectations occurred when in late November 2014 OPEC announced...

Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore several new forecasting...

It has been forty years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged....

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

We explore the effect on U.S. real GDP growth of the sharp and sustained decline in the global price of crude oil and hence in the U.S. price of gasoline after June 2014. Our analysis suggests that this decline produced a cumulative stimulus of about 0.9 percentage points of real GDP growth by...

It is commonly believed that the response of the price of corn ethanol (and hence of the price of corn) to shifts in biofuel policies operates in part through market expectations and shifts in storage demand, yet to date it has proved difficult to measure these expectations and to empirically...